Ormsby Hall

Laura Facey’s Laboratory of the Ticking Heart exhibition also drives home the potential of, and urgent need for, cultural spaces such as Ormsby Hall. Having just seen emerging Jamaican artist Nadine Hall’s MFA exhibition at the University of Miami Gallery in the Wynwood Building (which will be the subject of my next column), I cannot help but imagining it at Ormsby Hall, which would be the perfect homecoming for Nadine’s powerfully resonant work and the personal and cultural narratives it represents.

There are, at the present time, very few spaces in Kingston that can accommodate contemporary art projects of any larger scale. This lack of a supporting infrastructure contributes to the “brain drain” that is presently affecting contemporary art in Jamaica as there is too little to support our young artists and to motivate them to stay in Jamaica, especially at a time when there are significant opportunities elsewhere for Caribbean artists.

Few artists have the sort of resources and influence that made Laura Facey’s exhibition at Ormsby Hall possible, but her high-profile intervention is also an important vote of confidence in the site and may have opened the doors to new possibilities. While there are plans for the building to be turned into a business facility, associated with a large company that operates at other locations in the area, many have now recognized the immense potential of Ormsby Hall as a cultural space and there are several public calls, and two active petitions, for the building to be saved and turned into a cultural centre.

The Ormsby Memorial Hall, to use its full name, is named after the Reverend Stephen Ormsby, rector of the St Michael’s Church, and opened in 1930. For many years, it served as a performance space, where music recitals took place and where it is said that musicians such as Bob Marley and Don Drummond practised. Many also remember it as a site for Sunday school. It is a space with well-established roots in the downtown community, loaded with significant cultural memories.  I first visited Ormsby Hall in the mid-1990s, when I headed the MultiCare Foundation Visual Arts programme, when one of the partners in the programme, the Ormsby Hall Primary School, was housed in the building. The school moved out in 2010, after which the building fell into disrepair.

Ormsby Hall is a large, well-proportioned, and open space, with great acoustics and a performance stage, which many possibilities for art exhibitions, music, dance and theatre performances, and other cultural activities. It is an architecturally distinctive example of the modernist Art Deco style which was popular in Downtown Kingston at that time and a part of a still under-recognized but important aspect of Jamaica’s architectural heritage. While it obviously needs termite treatment and other repairs, I was told that the building is structurally sound and that restoring it is entirely feasible. There is more than enough land space to add studio and rehearsal spaces at the back that could, among other things, support an arts residency programme. It is, furthermore, located along a major public transport route, and there is ample space for parking, and as an open, single-floor structure with multiple doorways, it could be retrofitted easily to become disabled-accessible.

Ormsby Hall is, indeed, well positioned to become the sort of accessible, multi-purpose cultural space Downtown Kingston so urgently needs for the plans for a vibrant, socially inclusive, and community-based Art District are to become a reality, and for our contemporary arts to be supported by the infrastructure they need to thrive and to engage local audiences. If that happens, it should come with a well-considered financial plan, not only for the restoration and operations of the building, but also to allow visual and performing artists to use it at an affordable, perhaps grant-supported cost. The latter is something to consider for Kingston Creative’s Catapult Grant programme, which is currently being reimagined for the post-pandemic period. It could be a real game-changer in the Jamaican art world.

If you wish to support the petitions to save Ormsby Hall, you can find them at the following links: https://chng.it/DPJnCDq5Rg and https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/ormsby-hall-for-visual-and-performing-arts.

Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.